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DanMachi Episode 7 Review

Ahhhh just when you think DanMachi is taking things more emotionally in their fantasy adventure world, the story takes a turn back to the fan service harem aspects. Now that Bell has officially taken Lily as his supporter, she becomes another rival to Hestia within the guild. While quite cute, I do feel like Hestia should be a bit more mature about this entire situations cause she IS the goddess and head of the guild.

Bell finally ends up meeting the lovely (though somewhat air-headed) Aiz Wallenstein. Because Aiz feels back that the Minotaur that escaped from her battle, attacked Bell, she formally apologizes and then decides to give him a few training sessions to help him improve. Bell is TOTALLY starstruck and head over heels over Aiz LOL even though it seems like she really doesn’t have any personality. Naturally, her back story is a whole avenue of curiosity. Who trained her? And how did she get so strong?

In the background, we see Aphrodite planning something mysterious, something to do with Bell for sure. Meanwhile, in the depths of the dungeon we see a huge-ass monster preying on unsuspecting adventurers… for some reason.

The series could have done so much better as a strictly RPG-styled adventure anime rather than a harem romance fantasy set-up. While DanMachi makes a valiant effort to balance the adventuring and the harem comedy scenes it really doesn’t work out that well. One of the main reasons is because each of the girls in Bell’s supposed “harem” occupies a different space in his life. They all very literally have different roles in relation to Bell’s adventurer status. As a result, they never interact with him in the same setting to build up romantic tensions. I’d also argue that Bell is quite infatuated with Aiz and that his love with Hestia and his love for Lily are completely different kinds of affection. He worships Aiz more than he actually likes her because she’s such a beautiful, distant and skilled adventurer way out of his world.

My biggest issue with episode seven is that the plot doesn’t move forward in any way. Sure, Bell finally gets to meet Aiz and Lily is integrated into the group but once again we’ve simmered in thirty-minutes of a typical adventurer’s every day routine. Since Aiz herself has nothing of importance to contribute in dialogue, nothing new to her character has been revealed. The training sessions end on a stale note. Bell hasn’t changed at all and we’re reaching the end of the series soon… what’s left is to figure out what how Bell’s been manipulated by Aphrodite behind the scenes so that it can all blow up in a grand climactic monster-adventurer-goddess fight at the season’s end.